this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Please be aware that votes are effectively already public, just not shown in the Lemmy UI.
I was unaware of that. I thought it was only accessible to instance admins, and I think that's how it should be.
In Lemmy, only admins and mods can see votes. But most other ActivityPub implementations show votes freely and there's nothing in the protocol that makes votes private. Votes are inherently public - they are only hidden behind a curtain that is very easy to get around in Lemmy.
I mean, this starts to get moot if no one is aware doesn't it. You might dismiss the design as merely artificial obscurity, but if no one is pulling up the data, then the obscurity is working. The "curtain" you cite isn't trivial for the vast majority of users, which is what this is all about. Starting an instance and extracting the desirable data is a pretty tall hurdle where just the effort alone is prohibitive and enough to give someone a chance to calm down.
You don't need to start a whole instance to find votes, you just need a user on any of the services that show votes publicly.
Also, if someone is getting angry about downvotes in a bad way, moderators should just step in. People should learn that votes is just part of the system and accept them.
Well if that sort of thing started happening, I think it’d be reasonable to have that person blocked, banned or defederated.
IMO, What’s possible doesn’t need to dictate what’s easy and common, especially when there are always balances and countermeasures previously involved.
I forgot other fediverse platforms interact with this place. So upvotes translate to likes on mastodon and other platforms? I still feel like this should be anonymized, but I also get how that could be exploited since likes aren't auditable in that case.
Yes, upvotes are in fact just a Like object in ActivityPub and downvotes is a Dislike object. This translates to various other concepts in other ActvityPub apps, depending on what they choose to call it or how they handle them.
There is no mechanism for doing this in ActivityPub at the moment. Also, you may not want that because it would then also be hidden from admins and mods, who would then be powerless to discover vote manipulation or downvote brigading and other nasty behavior. Having the votes be transparent is probably better as it allows people to discover this kind of behavior much more easily.